And yet Pound’s translation reinscribes its own modernist brand of individualism by editing the Anglo-Saxon text. As the medievalist Christine Fell has remarked, this text contains “two traditions, the heroic, if we may so define it, preoccupation with survival of honour after loss of life—and the Christian hope for security of tenure in Heaven” (Fell 1991:176). However these conflicting values entered the text, whether present in some initial oral version or introduced during a later monastic transcription, they project two contradictory concepts of subjectivity, one individualistic (the seafarer as his own person alienated from mead-hall as well as town), the other collective (the seafarer as a soul in a metaphysical hierarchy composed of other souls and dominated by God). Pound’s translation resolves this contradiction by omitting the Christian references entirely, highlighting the strain of heroism in the Anglo-Saxon text, making the seafarer’s “mind’s lust” to “seek out foreign fastness” an example of “daring ado,/So that all men shall honour him after.” In Susan Bassnett’s words, Pound’s translation represents “the suffering of a great individual rather than the common suffering of everyman […] a grief-stricken exile, broken but never bowed” (Bassnett 1980:97). The archaizing translation strategy interferes with the individualistic illusion of transparency, but the revisions intensify the theme of heroic individualism, and hence the recurrent gibes at the “burgher” who complacently pursues his financial interests and “knows not […] what some perform/Where wandering them widest draweth” (Pound 1954:208). The revisions are symptomatic of the domestic agenda that animates Pound’s foreignizing translation, a peculiar ideological contradiction that distinguishes modernist literary experiments: the development of textual strategies that decenter the transcendental subject coincides with a recuperation of it through certain individualistic motifs like the “strong personality.” Ultimately, this contradiction constitutes a response to the crisis of human subjectivity that modernists {37} perceived in social developments like monopoly capitalism, particularly the creation of a mass work force and the standardization of the work process (Jameson 1979:110–114).
The examples from Graves and Pound show that the aim of a symptomatic reading is not to assess the “freedom” or “fidelity” of a translation, but rather to uncover the canons of accuracy by which it is produced and judged. Fidelity cannot be construed as mere semantic equivalence: on the one hand, the foreign text is susceptible to many different interpretations, even at the level of the individual word; on the other hand, the translator’s interpretive choices answer to a domestic cultural situation and so always exceed the foreign text. This does not mean that translation is forever banished to the realm of freedom or error, but that canons of accuracy are culturally specific and historically variable. Although Graves produced a free translation by his own admission, it has nonetheless been judged faithful and accepted as the standard English-language rendering by academic specialists like Grant. In 1979, Grant published an edited version of Graves’s translation that pronounced it accurate, if not “precise”:
[It] conveys the peculiarities of Suetonius’s methods and character better than any other translation. Why, then, have I been asked to “edit” it? Because Robert Graves (who explicitly refrained from catering for students) did not aim at producing a precise translation—introducing, as he himself points out, sentences of explanation, omitting passages which do not seem to help the sense, and “turning sentences, and sometimes even groups of sentences, inside-out.” […] What I have tried to do, therefore, is to make such adjustments as will bring his version inside the range of what is now generally regarded by readers of the Penguin Classics as a “translation”—without, I hope, detracting from his excellent and inimitable manner.
In the twenty-two years separating Graves’s initial version from the revised edition, the canons of accuracy underwent a change, requiring a translation to be both fluent and exact, to make for “vivid and compulsive reading” (ibid.:8), but also to follow the foreign text more closely. The passages quoted earlier from the life of Caesar were evidently judged accurate in 1979, since Grant made only one revision: {38} “catamite” was replaced by “bedfellow” (ibid.:32). This change brings the English closer to the Latin (“contubernium”), but it also improves the fluency of Graves’s prose by replacing an archaism with a more familiar contemporary usage. The revision is obviously too small to minimize the homophobia in the passages.
Pound’s version of “The Seafarer” also cannot be simply questioned as too free because it is informed by the scholarly reception of the Anglo-Saxon text. As Bassnett has suggested, his omission of the Christian references, including the homiletic epilogue (ll. 103–124), is not so much a deviation from the text preserved in the Exeter Book, as an emendation that responds to a key question in historical scholarship: “Should the poem be perceived as having a Christian message as an integral feature, or are the Christian elements additions that sit uneasily over the pagan foundations?” (Bassnett 1980:96). In English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, for example, Stopford Brooke asserted that “it is true, the Seafarer ends with a Christian tag, but the quality of its verse, which is merely homiletic, has made capable persons give it up as a part of the original poem” (Brooke 1898:153). Pound’s translation can be considered accurate according to early twentieth-century academic standards, a translation that is simultaneously a plausible edition of the Anglo-Saxon text. His departures from the Exeter Book assumed a cultural situation in which Anglo-Saxon was still very much studied by readers, who could therefore be expected to appreciate the work of historical reconstruction implicit in his version of the poem.
The symptomatic reading is an historicist approach to the study of translations that aims to situate canons of accuracy in their specific cultural moments. Critical categories like “fluency” and “resistancy,” “domesticating” and “foreignizing,” can only be defined by referring to the formation of cultural discourses in which the translation is produced, and in which certain translation theories and practices are valued over others. At the same time, however, applying these critical categories in the study of translations is anachronistic: they are fundamentally determined by a cultural political agenda in the present, an opposition to the contemporary dominance of transparent discourse, to the privileging of a fluent domesticating method that masks both the translator’s work and the asymmetrical relations—cultural, economic, political—between English-language nations and their others worldwide. Although a humanist theory and practice of translation is equally anachronistic, inscribing the foreign-language {39} text with current domestic values, it is also dehistoricizing: the various conditions of translated texts and of their reception are concealed beneath concepts of transcendental subjectivity and transparent communication. A symptomatic reading, in contrast, is historicizing: it assumes a concept of determinate subjectivity that exposes both the ethnocentric violence of translating and the interested nature of its own historicist approach.